Map of Vineland and Jordan

The village of Jordan came about because of the Twenty Mile Creek. Two hundred years ago, southern Ontario was covered in dense forest. There were two ways to travel: by boat or by foot using Indian trails. Jordan had both a small but convenient harbour and access to the most important Indian trail, the Iroquois Trail. With its advantageous site, the area had been used by aboriginal people for hundreds of years and undoubtedly had European squatters living in the area too before Governor Haldimand bought the Niagara Peninsula from the aboriginals in 1784.

Earlier in 1781, Col. John Butler had bought a strip of land four miles deep along the west side of the Niagara River. This allowed some settlers, mostly the families of elderly Butler's Rangers, to move to the west side of the river and remove some of the strain on Fort Niagara, which was swamped with refugees after the Revolutionary War. By the time the area around Jordan was surveyed in 1787, the war had finished and the Rangers disbanded. Many Rangers and other Loyalists were applying for land to compensate for losses suffered during the war. Early maps of Township 4 (later called Louth) show almost all of the land allocated to the Butler family, former Rangers, or other Loyalists. The Butler Family, however, wanted the land for speculative purposes. For £150 they sold 1200 acres to George and John Ball, sons of former Ranger lieutenant Jacob Ball. This land later became known as Ball's Falls.

Speculation may be the reason for other property to change hands. Lot 17 Concession 2 was allocated to Widow Margaret Hare in the early 1790s but by 1812, it was in the hands of Peter Fairchild. Fairchild died soon after and his widow married James Solomon Secord, son of former Ranger Solomon Secord and nephew of Laura Secord. It was most likely Peter Fairchild who built the log cabin that is now in Ball's Falls Conservation Area after being moved from its original site on Lot 17. When the Great Western Railway built a line through the township, it passed through Lot 17, where a station was built to service Jordan. A little community grew up around the station. At first the community was named Bridgeport but later came to be known as Jordan Station.

In 1799 a group of Mennonites from Bucks County Pennsylvania, attracted by the good land available in Canada, decided to make the trek. The group included Jacob Moyer, who later became the first Mennonite bishop in Canada. They were so enthusiastic about the land that they bought 1100 acres. Then Jacob Moyer and others returned to Bucks County to bring their families. The following year, a larger group came north. This group included Daniel High and his large family. Daniel gained title to 600 acres in Louth in 1801 from Johnson Butler, son of Col. John Butler. On his death in 1806, 100 acres (Lot 18 Concession 3) passed to his son Abraham. This property is all of the land east of 19th Street in Jordan.

The land on the west side of 19th Street passed to Abraham's brother Daniel Jr. This was bought by an entrepreneur named Jacob Snure in 1837. Snure had the land surveyed, divided into small parcels, and sold. So came into existence the village of Hoy, later Jordan. One theory is that the name Hoy is from the original family name of Abraham High, which was Hoch, meaning High in German. How the "ch" came to become "y" is not clear.

Jacob Snure came to Canada with his father, who settled in Pelham Township. Jacob later moved to the Jordan area where he married Rebecca Bradt, granddaughter of Captain Andrew Bradt of Butler's Rangers and daughter of a hero of the War of 1812, Peter Bradt. In 1829 Jacob leased the Ball woollen mill and started to sell woollen goods. He must have been successful for within eight years he was able to buy the land on which Jordan was to be built.

Places to see in Jordan are:

• Ball's Falls

  Ball's Lower Falls

  In 1807, two sons of Lieutenant Jacob Ball, George and John, bought 1200 acres from the four children of Col. John Butler for £150. By 1809 they had built a four-storey grist mill at the lower falls. After about 15 years, George bought out his brother and built a woollen mill near the upper falls. He leased the woollen mill to Jacob Snure in 1829. Ball's intention was to create a town on his property and in a move toward that goal he built a grand house, which had to double as a general store for a time. Unfortunately for the Balls, the railway passed by their little community called Glen Elgin and it gradually died.

  Ball's Grist Mill

  On the grounds of the Ball's Falls Conservation Area are two log cabins. The smaller, called the Furry Cabin, comes from near Morgan's Point in Wainfleet Township. The other log cabin is called the Fairchild Cabin comes from Jordan Station. One version of how it was built says that it was built about 1777 by two Secord brothers who were squatting on the land. This is not likely because the brothers, presumably Solomon and Stephen Secord, were in Butler's Rangers or the Indian Department fighting a war. It is more likely to have been built by Peter Fairchild who came to own the property sometime between 1791 and 1812. When he died, his widow married James, the son of Solomon Secord. It was James's son, another Solomon, who sold part of the land to the Great West Railway and so started Bridgeport (later Jordan Station).

  Fairchild Cabin

• Jacob Fry House

  Jacob Fry House behind the Jordan Museum

  The Heritage House at 3800 Main Street is the village museum. At the rear are two old buildings that are worth visiting. The old wooden house is the Fry House. It was originally located near the corner of Fly Road and Victoria Avenue. It was built by Jacob Fry (or Frey) in about 1815. Fry came here from Pennsylvania with other Mennonite families and became a successful farmer. It is built in a traditional German style using hand-shaped logs. It has a massive fireplace in the kitchen and nearby is a wood-burning stove for heating the house. Father and mother had a bedroom on the ground floor but the children slept upstairs. The house has many original pieces of furniture made by Jacob Fry.

  Schoolhouse

  Also behind the Heritage House is a schoolhouse. This limestone building was built in 1859 to replace a red-brick building that had burned down. This schoolhouse served the community until 1948 and has been restored to how it was in 1908. The schoolhouse takes parties of children and gives them a day's experience of what it was like to be in school in 1908.

  What's usually missed behind the Fry House is the graveyard. Long before the Fry House was moved here there used to be an old Mennonite church. It was built in 1845 as an adjunct to the Moyer Church in Vineland together with another church in Campden. The idea was to take the church to the people by rotating the services around the three buildings. The problem was that for two out of three services people would have to travel longer distances to the church. So this church was gradually abandoned and fell into disrepair. It was finally demolished over a century ago but its graveyard is still there. Like most Mennonite cemeteries it was open for anybody to be buried there so the are Mennonite graves (like that of Abraham High and his wife) and non-Mennonite graves (such as those of Caroline Secord, the widow of Peter Fairchild)

• Lewis Haynes House, Haynes Street near Jordan Road

  Lewis Haynes House

  Lewis Haynes was the son of a Loyalist, Adam Heins, and so was awarded Lots 16 and 17 Concession 4 in Louth Township. Here in 1829 he built this wonderful house that is called The Willows. The house has sidelights at the front entrance, 12-over-8 windows, and splendid green shutters to contrast with the orange brick. The bricks were made on the property. The original house was a log cabin a little south of the house and it had an above-ground cellar built in 1812 that still exists.

• Henry Honsberger House, 8th Avenue east of Victoria Avenue

  Henry Honsberger House

  Henry Honsberger was one of the large party of Mennonites who came north from Bucks County in 1800. He built this house in 1850 out of white pine cut on the property. The house originally had a porch that ran across the front of the house. The left addition is a doddy house built for retired father and mothers. The right addition is recent but done beautifully to recreate the atmosphere of the rest of the house. Although it does not large from the outside, the house has fourteen rooms and is huge from the inside.

  Other old houses in Jordan include:

  • The Jordan House at 2903 Main Street. This hotel, formerly known as the Jordan Hotel, has been here since 1842 when John Spence opened it. The oldest part is the one shown in the picture. This part contains the tavern, and the rear section contains the accommodations. The hotel is reputed to have been the meeting place for vigilantes hunting down cattle thieves in the 1840s and for smugglers preparing to smuggle liquor into the USA during prohibition.

    Jordan House

  • The Haynes-Griffin House at 3797 Main Street. Thought to have been built about 1840 by the Haynes family, it may have been built as a retirement home for Lewis Haynes.

    Haynes-Griffin House

  • The Doctor's House at 3799 Main Street. Built about 1840, this house was used by a series of village doctors, one of whom has been memorialized on the mounting stone in front of the Fry House.

    Doctor's House

  • The Jordan Bed and Breakfast at 3864 Main Street. This was once the home of the Harbour Master of Jordan Harbour. Since the harbour was closed off in the 1850s by a railway bridge, the house must have been built earlier than that.

    Jordan B&B

  • The Vintage House. This house is across the street from the Jordan B&B but is unnumbered because it is part of the Inn on the Twenty. It was designed and built by Newton Perry in 1840 as a retirement home for Isaac Wismer. Wismer was 18 years old when he emigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada with other Mennonites in 1800. He settled and built a farm on what is now the Prudhommes Landing hotel-and-restaurant strip on the lakefront between the QEW and the lake. Originally this red-brick 2½-storey house had two doors in the front. These were removed in 1920 and a new door cut into the south side of the building. The house was a residence until 1920, and then it was owned by Jordan Wines until the 1970s. It was bought by the Inn on the Twenty in 2000 and now holds the spa.

    Vintage House